• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

4 The Multiplication of Traces Xerographic Reproduction and One Hundred and One Dalmatians The production processes of society disappear into a stream of paper—a stream of paper, moreover, which is processed in a continuous flow like that of the cannery, the meatpacking line, the car assembly conveyor. —Harry Braverman1 At rows of blank-looking counters sat rows of blank-looking girls, with blank, white folders in their blank hands, all blankly folding blank paper. —Herman Melville2 THE IDEA OF XEROGRAPHY In 1963, Business Week ran a two-page advertisement for the Xerox 914, the first office photocopier. Earlier advertisements had touted the 914’s versatility, automation, speed, and low price. This campaign took a different tack. Below a photograph of a pair of identical ink drawings of an eagle, each set in an ornate frame and occupying the top three-quarters of its respective page, stretches a banner of text: We bought a famous Picasso picture. We took it out of the frame. Made a copy of it on our Xerox 914. Then we put the original back in its frame and also framed the copy. We photographed both of them. And here they are. Can you tell which is which? Are you sure?3 The answer, of course, is no. We can make out the embossed wallpaper behind the picture on the left, the beveled matting within each frame, the density of Picasso’s pen strokes, but the telltale signs of xerographic mediation are nowhere to be found. Even if we had the two pictures in front of us—not a photograph of the pictures, not a halftone screenprint of a photograph of the pictures, and certainly 108 The Multiplication of Traces 109 not a digital scan of a halftone screenprint of a photograph of the pictures—the differences between the original and the copy would be nearly invisible. A thin curlicue is a bit thicker in one picture than it is in the other, as are two of Picasso’s propulsive diagonal strokes, but these clues lead in no particular direction. Short of removing each picture from its frame and scrutinizing how the ink has or has not taken root in the paper, we could very well be duped by the duplicate. “As you can see,” the advertisement affirms, the Xerox 914 “copies line drawings and signatures flawlessly.” A Xerox of Guernica (1937) could not fool us, even if it were able to approximate that painting’s scale, nor could a black-and-white pho- tocopier successfully render the subtle gradations of brown, tan, and maroon in Gertrude Stein (1905–6). The black calligraphy and white paper of Picasso’s eagle drawing make it the perfect test case. If the original had been drawn in graphite or crayon, the copy would lose some of its finer textures. An all-black eagle would yield a mottled clone. But here the line is fine—but not too fine—and strong—but not too strong. We can read it as clearly as if it were written. Indeed, the looseness of Picasso’s penmanship suggests that he drew the eagle, signed his name, and dated the picture all in one sitting, perhaps without even refreshing his brush. The loop in the “P” of “Picasso” is amplified in the eagle’s feathers. Text abuts image, image abuts text, and the photocopier, which regards the entire field of the sheet of paper as a single unit, does not discriminate between text and image. It treats each squiggle and dash equally, as black marks on a blank field. Particles of pigment amass only where there is darkness. Xerography, which literally means “dry writing,” allowed for clean, crisp, and clear copies. Paper went in and paper came out. The first advertisements for the 914 listed the ways the new medium improved on older technologies of mechani- cal reproduction: unlike its predecessors the Rectigraph, Photostat, and Thermo- Fax, it did not “require expensive sensitized paper, or intermediate film negative, or liquid chemicals”; it was capable of copying “onto standard office paper (plain or colored), your own letterhead, or card stock,” not just flimsy carbon paper; it forwent the perils of stenography.4 These advertisements targeted businesses. Although it could do otherwise, the device was designed to reproduce text. Yet this 1963 advertisement holds out another possibility, in which the text might in fact be an image and images are treated as text. In addition to demonstrating the machine’s technical capabilities and practical uses, the advertisement makes an implicit aesthetic claim: it says that, for its purposes, a Picasso is the same as a memorandum. Simultaneously, the Xerox machine positions itself as a tool not just for the white- collar worker but also for the graphic designer, the photographer, the illustrator— as an artistic medium. That this particular technology underwent this kind of redefinition within just three short years is hardly remarkable. As media scholars like Lisa Gitelman, Rick Altman, James Lastra, and Jonathan Sterne have dem- onstrated, the identities of representational technologies are always contested.5 110 Chapter Four The parameters we have come to think of as defining and delimiting the telephone, the radio, the typewriter, et al. were “by no means historical inevitabilities, but rather the result of complex interactions between technical possibilities, economic incentives, representational norms, and cultural demands.”6 Objects originally intended for office use, such as the phonograph, are “reinvented” as household amusements; the projected motion picture proves more lucrative than the kineto- scope’s peephole model. The cultural development of the Xerox follows a no less winding path, one with multiple beginnings and an indeterminate end. A brief interlude into three years of xerography’s history, from 1966 to 1968, reveals just how many “networks of assumptions, habits, practices, and modes of representation” could coalesce in a single technology.7 In 1966, an estimated fourteen billion photocopies were made in the United States alone. That same year, Marshall McLuhan described Xerox’s rapid ascent as a “reign of terror” that threatened the wholesale destruction of the publishing industry and copyright laws: “Anyone can take any book apart, insert parts of other books and other materials of his own interest, and make his own book in a relatively fast time.”8 In April 1968, Xerox Corporation served as the sole sponsor for ABC’s airing of Emile de Antonio’s The Confrontation, a condensed version of de Antonio’s Point of Order! (1964), which consisted entirely of excerpts from the 188 hours of kinescope footage of the 1954 CBS broadcast of the Army-McCarthy hearings—McLuhan’s fear had assumed televisual form.9 The late 1960s also saw the first publication of Harry Zohn’s English translation of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in which version Walter Benjamin observes, “Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its image, or, rather, its copy.”10 As Yuriko Furuhata has shown, graphic designers in Japan drew heavily on Benjamin’s essay in their construction of a xerographic imaginary. For instance one important design journal of the period published an article titled “Graphic Art in the Age of Electronics” in 1968, in which graphic art was defined as the “art of copy and reproduction.”11 Meanwhile, the conceptual artist Timm Ulrichs photocopied the cover of the German edition of the “Work of Art” essay, and then photocopied that photocopy, and then photocopied that photocopy—on and on one hundred times. The image so degrades over generations that the ridges upon ridges of cumulative visual noise accrue into pointed whorls; that which withers in the age of xerographic reproduction still leaves a fingerprint.12 Each of these examples expands what Gitelman calls “the idea of xerography.”13 Xerox is a corporation, a verb, a machine, a product, a promise, a threat. Ulrichs’s photocopies may playfully tweak Benjamin, but the transformation of rigid text into something strange, amorphous, and unrecognizable recalls processes of decay and ruin. Xerox becomes an allegory. A sequence in Robert Taylor’s ani- mated feature The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat (1974) uses xerography to similar effect. A black crow stands atop a fort, defending his home of New Africa from the bullets spitting out of a racist pig’s machine gun. The people of New Africa, The Multiplication of Traces 111 Figure 4.1. A photocopy and its great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchild in Robert Taylor, The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat (1974). a Black separatist nation formed in what used to be New Jersey, are depicted in the background by a xerographic collage of shirtless men. As the onslaught con- tinues, the background changes eight times, each time replaced by a photocopy of the previous background. In a matter of seconds, the discrete human forms appear to have melted into a striated mass (fig. 4.1). The visual power of both Ulrichs’s and Taylor’s works derives from the Xerox machine’s failure to reproduce its own reproductions.14 (Perhaps the fastest way to determine which Picasso is the original and which Picasso is the copy would be to Xerox them.) Through the photocopy-by-photocopy or frame-by-frame study of each of these works, one can pinpoint the moment when the Xerox goes “wrong,” when the represented content is not only unrecognizable but also wholly illegible. A “bad” photocopy makes apparent the machine’s mediation. A “good” photocopy, on the other hand, maintains the uniformity of the original text—it is readable, dematerialized, and hence, tautologically, reproducible.

Load more

  36

Copy Link